When the Arab Spring erupted in 2011, the post-modern era of skepticism and pessimism in relation to positive, progressive political change was broken, albeit momentarily. The sight of thousands of people on the streets, demonstrating against corrupt politicians and their own exclusion from the system, filled many across the globe...

‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ The Thomas Theorem. Sociologist W.I. Thomas (1863-1947) December 21st 2012. The date looms, the new era beckons. For a vast number of people spread around the globe this is a significant date signalling the beginning of the...

A spectre is haunting the world- the spectre of Austerity. Deficit-cutting measures now haunt populations across the world and it is the poorest and most vulnerable that are being hit the hardest. Guy Standing in his latest book has termed this class of people The Precariat, those in vulnerable and...

Mr Guest Editor, following your revelation that, if the opportunity arose, you would like to return as the head of the country, we’ve had a long think about that and we think the public couldn’t agree more.. http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/what-tony-blair-did-next-7892590.html

The arts and the historical conditions of their creation are undoubtedly interdependent and not always easily demarcated, with each consistently blurring into the other. As critics such as Frederic Jameson have argued, the stylistic movement over time from realism to modernism and into post-modernism, has in many ways matched capitalism’s...

As has been more than amply evidenced in recent months and years, the final days of oppressive, regimes are very often ugly, uncertain, and deadly. An unwillingness to change with the times is characteristic of tyrannical regimes, whose leaders’ fondest fantasies seem to be the eternal prolongation of their final...

Utopias and dystopias of the past tell us something about the present: they reveal hopes and fears surrounding decisions that led to the way things are now. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis [1927] is a socialist fable of this kind. It unfolds the story of a mechanical city that has forgotten its...

Much has been written about the domestic implications of the Arab Spring, but the external relevance of the uprising across North Africa and the Arab world has not yet been considered in significant depth. The Tuareg rebellion in Northern Mali has forced this question to the surface. As Gaddafi’s patronage...

The separatist region of Transnistria has long been a disputed territory and as is the case with many other former constituents of the Soviet Union, such as Nagorno-Karabakh, it remains to this day a ‘frozen conflict’. Similarly to other enclaves formed after the fall of the Soviet Union, Transnistria’s status...